Sample Chapter

PACIFIC NORTHWEST:

One Week Before the Mast

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Those who would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell for pastime.
- EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY APHORISM

When I was thirteen, my parents bought a used sailboat, a ten-foot
wooden dory that I christened Wet Dream. For several summers, I
tacked around the waters off Cape Cod, imagining myself one of the
whalers who plied Nantucket Sound in the nineteenth century. I read
Moby-Dick, tied a bandanna around my head, even tried my hand at
scrimshaw. This fantasy life offered escape from the fact that I could
barely sail-or caulk, or knot anything except a shoelace. One day,
bailing frantically with a sawed-off milk jug after gashing the Wet
Dream against a rock, I found my whaling dream had become real. I
was Ishmael, the Pequod sinking beneath me.

This hapless memory returned to me as I studied an application for a
berth on His Majesty's Bark Endeavour. An Australian foundation
had built a museum-quality replica of Cook's first vessel and dispatched
it around the globe in the navigator's path. At each port, the ship's
professional crew took on volunteers to help sail the next leg and
experience life as eighteenth-century sailors. This seemed the obvious
place to start; if I was going to understand Cook's travels, I first had
to understand how he traveled.

The application form asked about my "qualifications and experience,"
with boxes beside each question, marked yes or no.

Have you had any blue water ocean sailing experience? Can you swim 50
meters fully clothed? You will be required to work aloft, sometimes at
night in heavy weather. Are you confident of being able to do this?

I wasn't sure what was meant by "blue water ocean." Did it come in other
colors? I'd never swum clothed, except once, after falling off the
Wet Dream. As for working aloft, I'd climbed ladders to scoop
leaves from my gutter in Virginia. I checked "yes" next to each
question. But the last query gave me pause: "Do you suffer from sea
sickness?"

Only when I went to sea. I opted for the box marked "moderate," rather
than the "chronic" box, fearing I'd otherwise be judged unfit.

A week later, I received a terse note confirming a berth in early autumn
from Gig Harbor, Washington, to Vancouver, British Columbia. The letter
came with a "Safety and Training Manual." A page headed "Abandon Ship"
offered this helpful tip: "Stay together in waters-stay calm." Other
pages dealt with "burns and scalds," "sudden serious injury," drowning,
and seasickness: "You may feel like you're dying but you will survive."
In case you didn't, there was a liability waiver to sign ("I understand
and expressly assume these risks and dangers, including death, illness,
disease ...").

The safety tips, at least, were stated in plain English. The training
section read like a home appliance manual, badly translated from Korean,
with "some assembly required." A typical diagram showed intersecting
arrows and loops, allegedly explaining the layout of "Bits & Fife
Rail to Fwd. of Mainmast Looking from Starboard Side."

I quickly gave up and spent the weeks until my voyage studying history
books instead. Among other things, I learned that the original
Endeavour was a mirror of the man who commanded it: plain,
utilitarian, indomitable. Like Cook, the ship began its career in the
coal trade, shuttling between the mine country of the north of England
and the docks of east London. Bluff-bowed and wide-beamed, the
ninety-seven-foot-long ship was built for bulk and endurance rather than
speed or comfort. "A cross between a Dutch clog and a coffin," was how
one historian described it.

The tallest of the Endeavour's three masts teetered a vertiginous
127 feet. Belowdecks, the head clearance stooped to four foot six. The
Endeavour's flat bottom and very shallow keel-designed so the
collier could float ashore with the tide to load and unload coal-made
the ship exceptionally "tender," meaning it tended to roll from side to
side. "Found the ship to be but a heavy sailer," wrote the ship's
botanist, Joseph Banks, "more calculated for stowage, than for sailing."
He wrote this in calm seas, two days after leaving England. When the
going turned rough, Banks retreated to his cot, "ill with sickness at
stomach and most violent headach."

Duly warned, I sampled a seasickness pill on the flight to Seattle. It
made me so listless and wobbly that I almost fell down in the aisle.
This seemed a bad state in which to work aloft, at night in heavy seas.
I flushed the rest of the pills down the airplane toilet.

The pier at Gig Harbor, an hour south of Seattle, teemed with gleaming
new yachts. In this sea of sleek fiberglass, the replica
Endeavour was easy to spot. The original ship had been made
almost entirely from grasses and trees-hemp, flax, elm, oak, pine
tar-with bits of iron and brass thrown in. The replica appeared much the
same. With its sails furled and its masts poking skeletally into the
damp air, the vessel looked boxy and brittle, a boat built from
matchsticks. At a hundred feet long, it wasn't much bigger than many of
the nearby yachts.

A dozen sailors, mostly tanned young Australians in navy-colored work
clothes, stood coiling ropes on the dock and bantering in the matey,
mocking fashion I knew well from my years in Sydney. "Press-ganged men
over there," one sailor said, pointing me to a waterside park. My fellow
recruits numbered forty, mostly Americans and Canadians, including six
women. Chatting nervously, I was relieved to discover that some of them
had little more sailing experience than I did.

Then again, they seemed a fit lot, accustomed to hard labor, or at least
hard exercise: construction workers, military veterans, sinewy joggers.
"This'll be like a week at a dude ranch," a broad-shouldered carpenter
assured me.

A trim, brisk figure strode over from the ship and barked, "Listen up!"
This was our captain, Chris Blake, a mild-featured man much shorter than
Cook but no less commanding in manner. "We'll get on with a very fast
learning curve," he said, handing us over to the ship's first mate, a
gruff Englishman named Geoff.

"This will be like going back into the Army, if you've ever been there,
with a lot less sleep," Geoff began. "Your straight eight, you're not
going to get it on this ship, so when you have a chance to put your head
down, do it." He also told us where to put our heads when seasick. "Make
friends with one of our plastic buckets and make sure you chuck it over
the lee side so you're not wearing your pizza. And no throwing up
belowdecks, because you'll have every other person throwing up beside
you."

A safety officer followed with a brief talk about abandoning ship. "Hold
your nostrils when you jump overboard because it's a long fall and can
break your nose," he said. "Blokes, keep your legs crossed when you go
over, same reason. Also, try to huddle together in the water. It's not
going to save you, but it might give you a few more minutes." Then he
warned us about the "gasp reflex." As he explained it: "The water's so
cold that you gasp and suck a lot in."

After this orientation, we split into three "watches," each one assigned
to a mast and a captain-of-tops, our drill sergeant for the week ahead.
My watch was mainmast, by far the tallest of the three, commanded by
Todd, a raffishly handsome Australian with a ponytail, earrings, and a
red bandanna wrapped round his unshaven neck. "Okay, you scurvy dogs and
wenches," he said, "let's start with the slops."

"Slops" was the eighteenth-century term for naval gear. Sailors on the
original Endeavour wore no prescribed uniform, nor would we dress
in period costume. Todd tossed us each a set of brown oilskin pants and
jacket. "In Australia they're called Driza-Bone, but we call them
Wet-as-a-Bastard. As soon as they get wet they stay that way." He also
issued us orange night vests, and safety harnesses that looked like
mountain-climbing belts.

Then Todd led us across the ship's deck and down a ladder, or
companionway, which plunged to a dark chamber called the mess deck. We
squinted at tables roped to the ceiling, as well as vinegar kegs, a huge
iron stove, and sea chests that doubled as benches-all packed into a
room the size of a suburban den. This cramped cavern would somehow
accommodate thirty of us, with the other ten recruits in a small
adjoining space.

Todd tossed us canvas hammocks and showed how to lash them to the beams
above the tables. We were allotted just fourteen inches' width of
airspace per sling, the Navy's prescribed sleeping area in the
eighteenth century. "If you don't know knots, tie lots," Todd said, as I
struggled to complete a simple hitch. He also showed us how to stow the
hammocks, snug and tightly roped, in a netted hold.

Stumbling around the dark deck, colliding with tables and people, and
bending almost double when the head clearance plunged to dwarf height, I
tried to imagine spending three years in this claustrophobic hole, as
Cook's men had. Incredibly, the original Endeavour left port with
forty more people than we had on board-accompanied by seventeen sheep,
several dozen ducks and chickens, four pigs, three cats (to catch rats),
and a milk goat that had circled the globe once before. "Being in a ship
is being in a jail," Samuel Johnson sagely observed, "with the chance of
being drowned."

THE ENDEAVOUR'S MISSION was as daunting as the conditions on the
ship. Though Ferdinand Magellan had first crossed the Pacific two and a
half centuries before, the ocean-covering an area greater than all the
world's landmasses combined-remained so mysterious that mapmakers
labeled vast stretches of the Pacific nondum cognita (not yet
known). Cartographers knew so little of the lands within the Pacific
that they simply guessed at the contours of coasts: a French chart from
1753, fifteen years before the Endeavour's departure, shows
dotted shorelines accompanied by the words "Je suppose."

One reason for this ignorance was that most of the ships sailing after
Magellan followed the same, relatively narrow band of ocean, channeled
by prevailing winds and currents, and constrained by poor navigational
tools. Also, geography in the early modern era was regarded as
proprietary information; navies kept explorers' charts and journals
under wraps, lest competing nations use them to expand their own
empires.

Not that these reports were very reliable. Magellan's pilot
miscalculated the longitude of the Philippines by 53 degrees, an error
akin to planting Bolivia in central Africa. When another Spanish
expedition stumbled on an island chain in the western Pacific in 1567,
the captain believed he'd found the biblical land of Ophir, from which
King Solomon shipped gold, sandalwood, and precious stones. Spanish
charts, and the navigational skills of those who followed, were so
faulty that Europeans failed to find the Solomon Islands again for two
centuries. No gold and not much of economic value was ever discovered
there.

Pacific adventurers also showed an unfortunate tendency toward
abbreviated careers. Vasco Nzqez de Balboa, the first European to sight
the ocean, in 1513, was beheaded for treason. Magellan set off in 1519
with five ships and 237 men; only one ship and eighteen men made it home
three years later, and Magellan was not present, having been speared in
the Philippines. Francis Drake, the first English circumnavigator, died
at sea of dysentery. Vitus Bering, sailing for the czar, perished from
exposure after shipwrecking near the frigid sea now named for him; at
the last, Bering lay half-buried in sand, to keep warm, while Arctic
foxes gnawed at his sick and dying men.

Other explorers simply vanished. Or went mad. In 1606, the navigator
Fernandes de Queirss told his pilot, "Put the ships' heads where they
like, for God will guide them as may be right." When God delivered the
Spanish ships to the shore of what became the New Hebrides, Fernandes de
Queirss founded a city called New Jerusalem and anointed his sailors
"Knights of the Holy Ghost."

But the most persistent and alluring mirage of Pacific exploration was
terra australis incognita, an unknown "south land," first
conjured into being by the wonderfully named Roman mapmaker Pomponius
Mela. He, like Ptolemy, believed that the continents of the northern
hemisphere must be balanced by an equally large landmass at the bottom
of the globe. Otherwise, the world would tilt. This appealingly
symmetrical notion was embellished by Marco Polo, who claimed he'd seen
a south land called Locac, filled with gold and game and elephants and
idolators, "a very wild region, visited by few people." Renaissance
mapmakers took the Venetian's vague coordinates and placed Locac-also
known as Lucach, Maletur, and Beach-far to the south, part of the fabled
terra australis. The discovery of America only heightened
Europeans' conviction that another vast continent, rich in resources,
remained to be found.

So things stood in 1768, when London's august scientific group, the
Royal Society, petitioned King George III to send a ship to the South
Pacific. A rare astronomical event, the transit of Venus across the sun,
was due to occur on June 3, 1769, and not again for 105 years. The
society hoped that an accurate observation of the transit, from
disparate points on the globe, would enable astronomers to calculate the
earth's distance from the sun, part of the complex task of mapping the
solar system. Half a century after Isaac Newton and almost three
centuries after Christopher Columbus, basic questions of where things
were-in the sky, as well as on earth-remained unresolved.

The king accepted the society's request, and ordered the Admiralty to
fit out an appropriate ship. As commander, the Royal Society recommended
Alexander Dalrymple, a distinguished theorist and cartographer who had
sailed to the East Indies, and who believed so firmly in the southern
continent that he put its breadth at exactly 5,323 miles and its
population at fifty million. The Admiralty instead selected James Cook,
a Navy officer whose oceangoing experience was limited to the North
Atlantic.

On the face of it, this seemed an unlikely choice-and, among some in the
establishment, it was unpopular. Cook was a virtual unknown outside Navy
circles and a curiosity within. He had spent the previous decade
charting the coast of Canada, a task at which he displayed exceptional
talent. One admiral, noting "Mr. Cook's Genius and Capacity," observed
of his charts: "They may be the means of directing many in the right
way, but cannot mislead any."